Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

Dave Page wrote:
> The catalogue was written after a great deal of discussion precisely
> because we were fed up with having multiple pages in different places
> listing all the addons etc, and causing much confusion for users and a
> maintenance headache for us.
>   

The concept I thought was interesting and wanted to explore for a minute 
was what a single page listing all the still active free add-on 
components in the briefest way possible would look like, as a potential 
replacement for the "place to find add-ons" component of pgFoundry.  
Maybe that page could be produced as a view out of the software 
catalogue, but it's missing two of the three critical pieces of data:  
the version compatibility info and a *short* description.  You'd also 
have to add a lot more projects.

If you're proposing that the catalogue is capable of serving the role of 
replacing the project location aspect of pgFoundry, that's a reasonable 
position.  But I feel that would take some improvements to the catalogue 
to do it, which would bring us right back to prototyping what they might 
look like.  Whenever I send someone to either the catalogue or pgFoundry 
suggesting it's filled with the useful pieces they expect bundled with 
the database, ones that are available but just distributed separately in 
PostgreSQL, they return either overwhelmed or having tried something out 
only to discover it was obsolete.  I don't think you see this problem as 
often because you're often distributing a larger package that includes 
compatible versions of many of those components, but that's not right 
for everyone. 

> Kindly don't revert us to that state by creating yet another page
> following a couple of emails on an otherwise unrelated thread.
>   

If you look you'll see that page is referenced exactly nowhere except on 
this list; I didn't even link to it on any other wiki pages.  I thought 
it was easier to spend 10 minutes producing a visual prototype than to 
just talk about what the page might look like instead.  If this 
discussion dies down and it doesn't go anywhere useful, I'll wipe it out.

-- 
Greg Smith    2ndQuadrant   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com  www.2ndQuadrant.com